In his short films and visual devices, Pierrick Sorin makes fun of human existence and artistic creation. In his films he is often the only actor (and he has also starred in two feature films). Since 2006, Pierrick Sorin dedicates himself to the staging of performances, opera in particular. With his “Théâtres Optiques”, he blends new media and the traditional diorama. In these miniature stage sets he magically appears as small hologram.

Pierrick Sorin was born in 1960 in Nantes, France. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes and received his Diplôme national supérieur d’expression plastique in 1988. In 2010, the culture center Lieu Unique in Nantes organized his first major retrospective. The exhibition at Galerie Albert Benamou runs until October 21, 2011.

Pierrick Sorin, solo exhibition at Galerie Albert Benamou. Interview with Pierrick Sorin, September 22, 2011. Video by VTV correspondent Christophe Ecoffet.

here

If the Art Loss Register wants to boast that it represents the interests of the good guys against the bad guys, as Rene Russo’s character did in the 1999 re-make of The Thomas Crown Affair, why did it choose to represent Nevada-based art dealer Jack Solomon in his title dispute against Steven Spielberg over ownership of Norman Rockwell’s Russian Schoolroom (right), (and later against Jody Goffman Cutler of the National Museum of American Illustration after she took Spielberg’s place in the dispute)?

Marinello has been all over the news wires recently, telling anyone who’ll listen that his organisation is a force for good in art disputes. He has just told CBC News (here) that “legitimate dealers will research the authenticity of a piece in a process known as provenance.” But should they use the ALR for that research?

Authenticity and provenance are different matters. Provenance checking — confirming an object’s ownership history — does not necessarily confirm its authenticity. Such subtleties are lost on those with little or no experience of the art world, but let’s not be too pedantic for the moment as there is a broader issue here.

You might ask why a legitimate dealer would use the ALR to check provenance when a short while ago the ALR’s own chairman Julian Radcliffe admitted in court to “misleading” a dealer who had made (and paid for) a provenance enquiry over paintings he wished to buy (see links to my earlier posts on this below).

More recently, the Art Loss Register failed to conduct its own “provenance” research into Jack Solomon’s previous connections with the Russian Schoolroom painting before representing him in the doomed lawsuit against Mrs Goffman Cutler. Mrs Cutler won the case in April 2010 and the Art Loss Register is now suing its former client, Jack Solomon. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t recall seeing Rene Russo’s character doing anything even remotely similar. She went after the bad guys; she didn’t represent them.

I may come across as a stuck record on this ALR topic, but there is a serious issue here and it is about the need for organisations involved in title disputes and art theft resolution to demonstrate good judgement. Representing a guy in a title claim when even the most low-level due diligence would have confirmed the folly of such representation is poor judgement. Due diligence checking by the ALR would have demonstrated (as was later confirmed in court) that Mrs Cutler had a superior claim to Russian Schoolroom. Did the ALR, like its erstwhile client Jack Solomon, see a potential pot of gold lurking in the corner of the Russian Schoolroom (“I’m sure in two calls I could turn it over for x million dollars before the sun goes down.” — Solomon quoted in Riverfront Times, 2 March, 2007).

To many people, the ALR comes across as a pioneering crusader for a more ethical art world. Some of us have been working in the art world for decades and have slightly longer memories. The ALR “misled” Michael Marks when Marks sought to make a provenance enquiry; the ALR allegedly “fell out” with Gisela Berman-Fischer over her attempt to win restitution of a Pissarro painting Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (left) taken from her family during the Holocaust (story here); and now it is locked in a sordid lawsuit with Solomon, whose title claim toRussian Schoolroom was baseless and who was found to be “not credible” by a Nevada District Court judge.

The ALR, poorly managed for decades, needs root and branch reform. But does it have the financial resources to undertake that reform and do the big three auction houses and the insurance companies who are its major shareholders have the guts to stand up and demand change?

One thing is for sure, the ALR has a way to go before the world sees it as “the Rene Russo character” of real life art crime.

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

Visit his blog

Nevada judge rules in title dispute over Norman Rockwell’s Russian Schoolroom

Unanswered questions in Rockwell’s Russian Schoolroom case

Art Loss Register sues Solomon over Rockwell’s Russian Schoolroom case

Art recovery: another can of worms prised open (Pissarro Holocaust restitution case)

‘Due Diligence’ is just a “ruse” (Michael Marks provenance case)

The Art Loss Register: A Correction

We were all told once in a while that “beauty lies in the beholder’s eye” and I agree to some extent, but let’s get real and look at the pictures. Like those of Kelly Mittendorf. Where is the beauty? Where? If someone finds it, please let me know and possibly explain why every at least 1,80 m tall bitch can call herself a professional model (seriously, you tall people heartlessly destroyed my little-girl-dream of becoming a superdupermodel ). Not that I’m in a bitchy mood on Mondays but she seriously reminds me of those sphynx cats. The eyes and all. I just feel like eww-ing all the time I go over the pictures.

Leaving those two aside, I also found some pretty people. Such as Aygul Galimullina (what a last name… ) and Ilva Hetmann. Ilva is German which surprises me since I haven’t seen much beauty (coming from my second homecountry) after Toni Garrn Superstar.

Nadiia Shapoval

Kelly Mittendorf

Anna Theresa Winkler for Pulcinella

(Anna Theresa Winkler is an independent fashion blogger and has worked for a major german fashionblog ‘lesmads.de’, while attending fashion shows all over the world. Her attitude to fashion is: “classy, fury & puristic”)

Visit her blog

Noah Horowitz, Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, Princeton, 2011, 361pp, hardback, £27.95 (Amazon price £26.55)

Back in 1979, the art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss offered a short inventory of “surprising things” that had somehow come to be considered as sculpture. They included: “”narrow corridors with TV monitors at the ends; large photographs documenting country hikes; mirrors placed at strange angles in ordinary rooms; temporary lines cut into the floor of the desert.” The category formerly known as sculpture, Krauss concluded, had become “almost infinitely malleable” and she went on to describe it as “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.”

In the decades since 1979, those “surprising things” have acquired the patina of normality as the field of sculpture has continued to expand to embrace a range of even more abstruse practices. These include an artist arranging to have sex with a collector and recording the encounter (Andrea Fraser); an artist setting up a temporary airport in the middle of the desert and chartering special flights in and out (eteam); and an artist preparing a Thai dinner for a series of invited guests (Rirkrit Tiravanija).

Although some of these activities produce tangible ‘takeaways’ in the form of collectable or ‘ownable’ objects and artefacts relating to the event, many do not. How, then, do they fit into the broader economics of the art market? In other words, how are they transacted and ‘collected’?

These questions have left many people in the conventional art economy utterly dumbfounded, particularly as most of them cannot comprehend how such practices could ever have been considered art in the first place.

Step forward art theorist and entrepreneur Noah Horowitz, whose new book, The Art of the Deal (cover pictured above left) seeks to illuminate the hermetic mysteries of this strange meta-world.

Given the apparent simplicity of many of these practices (engaging in videotaped sex or eating Thai food is not exactly intellectually demanding), it’s noteworthy that they have given birth to a complex body of art critical writing, at the centre of which is the voguish theory of ‘Relational Aesthetics’ devised by the ‘AlterModern’ pin-up boy, Nicholas Bourriaud.

Not so very long ago, intelligent books on the art market were about as plentiful as paintings by Vermeer. But over the last few years this publishing micro-sector has seen a minor explosion with economists, anthropologists, journalists and cultural commentators lining up to offer their take on this most opaque and elusive of markets.

One or two of these books have been genuinely insightful, offering an outsider’s cool analysis of the economic undercurrents and business networks driving an increasingly global trade. Others, breathlessly in thrall to the glamour of it all, and seemingly more concerned with the socks that dealers wear or what was on the menu at a Manhattan lunch, have been little more than a tiresome distraction.

Horowitz’s book belongs very much to the former category. He does a good job guiding us through the occasionally dense theoretical undergrowth, particularly as he seems as interested in the art as in the economics underpinning it.

Back in 1979, Rosalind Krauss could develop a line of thinking about sculpture and related practices without ever mentioning their market referents. Here in 2011, it seems that everything has to be framed within the discourse of market capital, investment strategies, and the economy of High Net Worth lifestyles. This, then, represents further confirmation, if any were needed, of art’s final subsumption into the great gaping maw of banking and high finance.

But given these considerations, Horowitz has written an intelligent and hugely interesting book. One caveat — because the art market has now been colonised by financiers and investment boffins any serious analysis of the art market must by necessity be written in finance-speak. So if you’re not happy with concepts of arbitrage, asset correlation, shorting and hedging, this may not be the book for you. But jargon notwithstanding, and given the highly specialised topics addressed, the book could not have been more clearly written.

Horowitz started out with the intention of writing a critical account of art investment. Instead, noting the speculative activity that had spread like a virus across the market during the last bull market (broadly from 2002-2008), he shifted his focus. The result is the first constructive attempt to explain the economic infrastructure underpinning the more outlandish examples of ‘cutting-edge’ contemporary art. But it doesn’t stop there. The book also addresses the market for video art, which is another category that seems to elude traditional concepts of “collectability” but which has nevertheless become a vital part of the contemporary art market. It then goes on to address two other topics that have generated interest and controversy in equal measure in art world circles in recent years — fine art investment funds, and art fairs.

Horowitz notes that in the decade from 1998 to 2008, “worldwide sales of contemporary art at auction swelled from just $48 million to over $1.3 billion, representing a more than eightfold rise in the sector’s market share, from 1.8 percent to 15.9 percent of the global fine art trade,” [Data from Artprice].

He goes on to note that during this same period, contemporary art overtook Impressionist and modern art as the most valuable sales category at the world’s leading auction houses, “an astonishing feat given the long-standing supremacy of these established categories and the sheer speed of its ascent.” This is interesting in the light of recent research conducted by Dr Clare McAndrew, whose report for the European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF), published in early March, concluded that: “Modern and Contemporary Art represents 58 percent of the fine art market as a whole, with the Modern art market accounting for six times the value of the Contemporary art sector.”

This can perhaps be explained by the fact that Horowitz is referring to auction house business, while McAndrew’s research sought to embrace the trade as well as auctions. Furthermore, Horowitz is analysing the period from 1998 to 2008, while McAndrew’s research focused on the post-recessionary period from 2008 to 2010. Nevertheless, the contrast between their summary conclusions is noteworthy and exposes the difficulty in achieving a consistent and helpful analysis of the art market when there is no consensus on how its categories and departments are defined.

Take the ‘Contemporary’ and ‘Modern’ categories, for example. Artprice defines ‘Contemporary’ as art made by artists born after 1945, while for Horowitz, ‘Contemporary’ refers to art made after 1960 “with emphasis on art produced by living artists in the last two decades.”

Horowitz’s book fills an important gap in contemporary art market literature in striving to understand and communicate how the most outré forms of contemporary art — particularly those grounded in ephemeral experience and which resist being memorialised in tangible collectable objects — are transacted and ‘collected.’

He and there he touches on, but never properly explores, the issue of intellectual property and copyright as they pertain to the art movements of the 1960s and later, such as Minimalism, Conceptualism and ‘video’ art — a topic he explores with exhaustive rigour in the first chapter. It’s notable that Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss, (whose video work ‘How Things Go’ was re-phrased by Honda’s advertising agency), and British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster, (whose shadow projection technique was colonised and sanitised by John Lewis for its Christmas TV ad), were both content merely to register symbolic objections to what they saw as the high-handed appropriation of their work by commercial organisations and yet stopped short of seeking legal redress.

While Horowitz’s chapters on Video Art and Conceptual Art are engaging and insightful, I was most drawn to his explorations of art fairs and art investment funds, both of which grew like topsy during the last boom. Art fairs continue to thrive, while most art investment funds have run aground.

Few art funds have had the staying power of the biggest player in the sector — the Fine Art Fund (FAF) run by Philip Hoffman. But then few art investment vehicles have the likes of Ivor Braka, Johnny Van Haeften, Charles Beddington and James Roundell sitting in the back seat. However, such deep expertise must come at a price and I’m not convinced by Horowitz’s conclusion that the world’s leading art experts are fully incentivized to support the fund with top quality art rather than transact the best objects themselves.

My instinct tells me that most art funds — the Fine Art Fund included — take advantage of the desire of High Net Worth individuals and other credulous outsiders to play in a game they don’t understand but to which they are almost fatally in thrall. Most of them are seduced by an equity story that is little more than a fairy tale. One suspects the real money-making deals are done elsewhere by the fund’s advisers and buyers dealing on their own account. Most of them have access to capital, or can saddle up with others who have. That way they enjoy all of the upside. As for the risk, well, if the recent meltdown was driven by anything it was driven by that old shibboleth: the greater the risk, the higher the reward.

But despite the false starts, fine art funds are still fuelled by bullish self-confidence. Horowitz quotes one typical investment wonk confidently predicting that art is “heading down the same road” as hedge funds and private equity investing as an opportunity that will be “to the eventual benefit of all investors.” However, the book’s Appendix, listing “the universe of art investment funds” as of December 2009, reveals that most of these planets are little more than black holes, having long since been dissolved or abandoned.

Horowitz is an optimist too (as a director of the recently launched VIP Art Fair, perhaps he needs to be). He breezily concludes that the rather gloomy landscape does “not diminish the potentially lucrative investment prospects of art funds. If they raise sufficient capital from investors, their large capital reserves and extensive market knowledge could certainly enable them to exploit informational and regional asymmetries arising in the marketplace.” Note the big “if” sitting right in the middle of that paragraph.

What seems more likely is that the relatively recent explosion of art investment funds was merely another concomitant of the casino capitalism that sent the banking sector into a death-star tailspin. Horowitz provides a succinct summary of the Wall Street debacle in his conclusion, which effectively ties the art market’s fate to that of the broader global economy.

As a balanced, beautifully written, and erudite analysis of the very recent art market, this book isn’t likely to bettered for the foreseeable future. Horowitz seems to have put his vested entrepreneurial interest in the art market to one side and has been more critical than most other recent commentators writing on this topic. But at the end of the day, he’s wise enough to hedge his bets. “Generalisations, of course, are never absolute,” he writes, “but prudence is sensible, moving forward.”

Amen to that.

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

Visit his blog

I don’t know whether the title is exactly hitting the point I want to make but when I had a look on the latest collection Jeremy Scott just released at New York Fashionweek, my first thought was probably the mixture of “What The Fuck”, “Oh My God” and a huge laugh. There is definitely none else who can release such a complete transformation of ones own craziness at a fashionweek and still gets the fashionworld’s full attention (including my little head which hopefully counts to this world someday ).

Anna Theresa Winkler for Pulcinella

(Anna Theresa Winkler is an independent fashion blogger and has worked for a major german fashionblog ‘lesmads.de’, while attending fashion shows all over the world. Her attitude to fashion is: “classy, fury & puristic”)

Visit her blog

I think that most of us all know the old beloved story of Red Riding Hood. In case you don’t, it’s a little girl who is on her way to her grandma (because she’s ill) when a wolf is crossing her way somewhere in the forest. They have a nice chat and the wolf figures out where the little girl is going and convince her to pick some flowers. While picking the flowers the wolf finds the grandma’s house and eats her. When red riding hood is entering the house she’s wondering why grandma has such a hairy appearance and some other aesthetic features, which belong more to a wolf than to one’s granny. (In fact the wolf has taken the grandma’s clothes and put them on in order to fool red riding hood).

While wondering why grandma is not looking the same anymore, the wolf takes his chance and eats her as well. After the brothers Grimm, a ranger finds the wolf and opens his stomach to get red riding hood and her grandma out of the wolf. Afterwords they put some stones into his tummy and he dies.

Anyways. The point why I’m posting about red riding hood shouldn’t be the old story but the new version of it, coming out in March. Although I rigorously disapprove Twilight, I have to admit that the makers of it made me curious of this new interpretation of red riding hood. Doesn’t it remind of “The Village” a little? The red colour and that monster in some little village where SOMEBODY knows who the beast is? I will watch that movie and hope it’s not another bad piece of fantasy drama as Twilight.

Anna Theresa Winkler for Pulcinella

(Anna Theresa Winkler is an independent fashion blogger and has worked for a major german fashionblog ‘lesmads.de’, while attending fashion shows all over the world. Her attitude to fashion is: “classy, fury & puristic”)

Visit her blog

photocredits: Tumblr

We have gathered together the highlights for last year in a fancy 3d flash animation, with direct links to the supporting artist’s work on artition.
Do have a look on: www.huhnt.com

The Turner Prize 2010 was awarded to Susan Philipsz yesterday evening. The £25,000 prize was presented by Miuccia Prada.

The jury admired the way in which her work provokes both intellectual and instinctive responses and reflects a series of decisions about the relationship between sound and sight. Philipsz’s work draws on the immersive properties of sound and uses her own voice to create powerful sculptural experiences…

I was at a reception at the Royal Academy a couple of nights ago for the launch of Michael Peppiatt’s marvellous new book, In Giacometti’s Studio (top). Artists’ studios have long been a source of fascination to writers and photographers, although few books have come close to Alexander Liberman’s The Artist in His Studio of 1960.

Liberman’s photographic essay gave us a privileged glimpse into the intimate working environments of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, the Cubists, the Surrealists, and what was then called ‘The New Generation’, which included Dubuffet, Richier, and indeed Giacometti himself.

What’s interesting about these projects is that the camera is drawn inexorably to the telling romantic details — the eloquent detritus on the floor, the humble wood-burning stove, the pinned-up postcards on the walls, the accumulated bricolage of the creative mind. But what they never quite grasp are the true dimensions of the room.

Giacometti’s ramshackle studio behind Montparnasse is caked in plaster dust, its walls covered with scribbles and sketches, the floor crowded with his signature totemic figures under construction, some shrouded in wet sheets to keep the clay damp. It’s hard to get a sense of how big the room is because the eye is always drawn to the art. However, as Peppiatt informs us, there wasn’t room to swing a cat in Giacometti’s studio. And yet it remained a popular meeting place for writers, painters, sculptors and assorted intellectuals for decades (1926-66).

After the book launch I got to thinking about that tiny studio as a symbol for the art world in general, which despite its ever-globalizing spread is also a small world populated by relatively few people, many of whom know each other. The main difference is that where Giacometti’s room was caked in grime, the contemporary art world is upholstered with cash.

Bainbridge’s sale (image: Rex Features)
The image, right, shows representatives of some of the wealthiest collectors in China crammed together like sardines on a French sofa in the small west London auction rooms of Bainbridge’s. The guy in the middle is turning to acknowledge the applause of his disappointed fellow bidders who have just watched him offer the winning £53 million for a Chinese Qianlong-reign imperial porcelain vase.

Western nations looted China of many of its cultural treasures in the 19th century and now the Chinese are wealthy enough to buy them back. But who are they bidding against in this project of cultural retrieval? Why, their fellow Chinese, of course.

One cannot help wondering why they don’t form what used to be called ‘a ring’. This is where a number of specialist dealers team up before a sale so as not to compete against each other on the lots they’re interested in. One of them is elected the bidder and the others stand down. Afterwards, when the group’s elected bidder has bought the lot at a fraction of what it would have cost had they all been competing against each other, they leave the saleroom and hold a mini auction in a local pub or coffee shop. One of them gets the lot but everyone else leaves with compensatory money in their pockets (based on the difference between what they actually paid and what they might have had to pay had they not formed the ring). After all, why give to the auctioneer what you can keep for yourself?

For decades, the ‘ring’ was a constant and pernicious presence at provincial UK auctions. I have no doubt it still exists in some form today, despite being technically illegal as a price-depressing mechanism. But clearly the Chinese haven’t cottoned onto it, or a version of it. Nor do they seem remotely concerned at having to pay such unconscionable sums to buy back what in many cases was taken from them by force.

Of course, these prices are all relative. There are now hundreds of billionaires in China and their numbers are expanding every week. This changes the relative significance of money and nowhere is that change more pronounced than in the art market.

At the Royal Academy book launch I got chatting to a prominent member of the London contemporary art trade who had just returned from the New York auctions. He was jubilant at the extent to which the market had recovered from the temporary blip of recession and was now back on its familiar upward bell-curve. “What you have to understand,” he said, with alarming nonchalance, “is that a billion is not that unusual any more. I have many collectors who think nothing of spending $600 to 800 million per year on their art collection.”

Clearly these guys are living in a parallel universe.

Meanwhile, the auction houses, aware of the availability of these seemingly limitless resources, are once again engaging in all kinds of exotic financial derivatives, erecting screens at the auction to close down the sightline between bidders in the room and their staff on the telephones, promising ‘guarantees’ to vendors and accepting “irrevocable bids” from mysterious third parties in return for a share of “the upside”. How all these mechanisms actually work, and the extent to which they manipulate the market, nobody can ever say since they are all conducted by faceless bean-counters in smokeless back office rooms prior to the sale.

And there I was, thinking ‘the ring’ was bad.

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

Visit his blog

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Michael Peppiatt, In Giacometti’s Studio (Yale University Press in association with Eykyn and Maclean, New York and London, 2010), £33.25 (Amazon price).